Welcome

Sometimes a cause is too important to abandon, even though one's efforts in advancing it over the years wax and wane as life's demands and transitions absorb more time and attention. So it is for me with the problem of vehicle-into-building crashes. The intensity of my focus has brightened and dimmed, repeatedly, since I was hit in 2008. The flame of my concern nonetheless remains.

I commend Storefront Safety Council co-founder and safety expert Rob Reiter for having continued the effort, unabated, to not only shine a spotlight on the problem but also to continually add to his data on the frequency of these crashes.

Likewise, a big thanks goes to the news media for it's coverage of the issue. It's been a privilege to serve as a resource for reporters and producers.

Kudos also to Kimberly Reiter for doing a great job building and maintaining the StorefrontSafety.org website. It is now a much more robust online home for crash examples and safety tips than my own site here, particularly as many of the links to newspaper and TV stories on specific crashes featured in my older posts have gone dormant. (Some media outlets keep their older content online for years, while others delete it more quickly.)

As I've noted before, many lives are profoundly changed month after month because of the flaws in our built environment that leave people exposed to errant drivers and out-of-control vehicles. The need to implement prevention and protection strategies continues.

If you are landing here for the first time...welcome. I hope my archived material will prove useful for you. And if you're visiting simply to see if a light still shines in the window...thanks as always for your continued interest.

Either way, by all means go visit Rob's sites. And you can still reach me at: mark [at] wrightscontent.com.

—Mark

(Image credit: The original photo came from a candle company via Amazon.com, but has been significantly altered for use on this site.)

Welcome, NAIOP Readers!

Photo of Wintergreen Plaza in Rockville, Md.,
by Mark Wright, courtesy of NAIOP.

Thanks to NAIOP, the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, for the opportunity to spotlight the vehicle-into-building crash problem in the spring issue of Development Magazine.

The article by Rob Reiter and me went live online March 20, plus will be in the print edition sent to NAIOP members: How Safe Is Your Parking Lot?

As risk control expert David Natalizia said in the article, “This is an important issue that may have been beneath the radar because of the difficulty in understanding its magnitude and scope.”

And parking design consultant Warren Vander Helm observed, “There is no reason why a design for an average parking area has to include nose-in parking,” which is one of the primary contributing factors in storefront crashes.

SXSW Tragedy Spotlighted in The Atlantic Cities

Image via The Atlantic Cities, posted to Twitter by @ColinKerrigan

Thanks to Rob Reiter's fast action and Sarah Goodyear's fast writing, the murderous results of a driver who drove through a crowd of people at the SXSW music festival early this morning in Austin, Texas, are getting the attention they deserve with a focus on the need for pedestrian protection. Here's Sarah's article today in The Atlantic Cities: We're Shamefully Bad at Protecting Pedestrians at Events Like SXSW. Kudos to Rob and Sarah for highlighting the problem.

Data Gives Insights into Crash Problem

Part I: When risk control pro David Natalizia surveyed colleagues via his blog to assess their perceptions about vehicle-into-building crashes, he got responses from 20 readers — and made some interesting discoveries:

• First off, 90 percent of the respondents had a pretty high level of awareness that these accidents happen frequently — and 75 percent recognized that the magnitude of the problem would not be picked up by NHTSA data.
• They held a strong impression about who’s typically not at the wheel during these crashes, with 85 percent indicating that most such crashes do not involve teen drivers.
• Respondents showed less consensus about the statement, ‘Positioning parking spaces perpendicular to a building may increase risks,’ with 65 percent agreeing, 20 percent neutral, and 15 percent disagreeing.
• Awareness about the ineffectiveness of wheel stops and curbs as crash barriers appeared to be high, with only 10 percent agreeing with the statement that ‘Wheel stops and curbs effectively prevent vehicles from crashing forward into buildings.’
• There was significant disagreement around the survey question that stated, ‘No standard practices exist for controlling this hazard,’ with 70 percent disagreeing, 20 percent agreeing, and 10 percent neutral.

I’ll be asking David to weigh in with his interpretation of those findings, but for now let me simply say ‘Thanks!’ to him here for posting the survey on his blog and being willing to engage his readers on this issue. Risk control professionals have a huge role to play in moving the vehicle-into-building crash conversation forward with other key audiences.

Part II: Another set of interesting numbers came out this morning in the form of charts from Rob Reiter, showing several findings based on his stats from 2013. A couple of them surprised me, but for now I’ll leave you with Rob’s work:

Source: Rob Reiter

Source: Rob Reiter

Source: Rob Reiter

If you prefer pie charts, you'll find 'em here.